10-15-2010, 09:46 PM
Shemaya, I'm glad that you've also been able to have that wonderful feeling of church as a spiritual community.
@ndy, if you'd rather have a special service to read your poetry, why not?
Both of those churches have some pretty cool mottoes.
Now for the story of my time with the troublesome church, in the non-denominational denomination.
The situation was about as disconnected as you can get and still refer to a denomination. There was a senior minister and an associate minister on staff at the church. Both positions had the husband in the official position but the wife was also very active in a way which was not clearly defined. There was also a youth minister. Seemed like a nice guy, but since I don't have kids I had next to no interaction with him.
The associate minister and his wife, a very balanced and grounded couple I liked a lot, moved out of town to respond to a family crisis. With them gone, the senior minister couple, the wife in particular, did some things I believe were very inappropriate and clearly contrary to any reasonable measure of Christian love or earthly good sense.
I was very deeply dismayed by her having us come into a side room for a ten minute haranguing tirade from her just before the service. Then, my partner in tears, Mrs. Pastor circulated with beaming smiles to happily start a service about how Christians communicate lovingly. Since then I've done more studies about cults and I think the senior minister couple were sliding downhill with some dangerous tendencies.
I was active in helping with one aspect of the ministry that used many volunteers. Although this is generally a strong area within the denomination, at the church with Alpha this area was led by someone without appropriate leadership ability or technical skills. That ministry area also went downhill.
All of this was very disconcerting to me.
At the church that presented Alpha there was no board, no elders, no clear path of oversight in the denomination. With no clear way to report a concern, we left that church. After a while we got a referral to a different religious group where we felt more welcomed.
Only one person tried to keep in touch, rather dismayed and baffled to hear about our bad experiences. There was no tell-off from anyone else, we simply stopped communicating on both sides.
This was at a time when my life really fell apart in several ways, including my health and my partner's health, and communication with almost everybody broke down. I miss some of the nice people there and have no way to contact them now. If I had their phone numbers or email addresses, the information was probably lost in a move across town since then.
Shortly after we left, the church gave up their plan to buy land and build a new larger building. They gave up their rented building and program space. They put heavy emphasis on the weekly home meetings, with monthly picnic in the park type of big meetings. From the description they somewhat like old-fashioned tent revivals.
From the updates described on their web site, apparently a super-enthusiastic core group loved these changes and felt they were recreating first-century Christianity. I got the impression they had even looser ties, or cut ties entirely I'm not sure which, with the non-denominational denomination such as it was.
This was at a time when the local economy took a nosedive. I don't know to this day if this non-church church idea was all really planned, or a scramble to salvage something after giving went way down.
Just now I took a look at the denomination's website. They have no listings in my metro area. They also now have a pretty clear path of regional overseers. Their Wikipedia entry mentions that in recent years they've added quite a bit of structure to try to keep up with their growth in new congregations.
The strange local non-church church's website is still up. It has no mention of anything about the denomination or the history of the church. It seems to have had no updates in a year and a half. Their actively happy discussion forum is long gone and there's no mention of the weekly home groups. But there are ways to donate money online!
A separate discussion forum about churches in general mentions some people from there who found a new church home in this town.
I also see comments from several people who point out that it's hard to generalize about the denomination, since each local senior pastor can pretty much do whatever they want. Apparently ordination as a senior pastor doesn't require seminary or any particular training, only experience as an associate pastor. It seems the reconnection with the divine that inspired the first church of this movement hasn't been lost, but attempts to duplicate that elsewhere sometimes work out and sometimes don't.
Well that's what I wanted to talk about. The experiences with the subsequent church are another story, probably for another time.
@ndy, if you'd rather have a special service to read your poetry, why not?
Both of those churches have some pretty cool mottoes.
Now for the story of my time with the troublesome church, in the non-denominational denomination.
The situation was about as disconnected as you can get and still refer to a denomination. There was a senior minister and an associate minister on staff at the church. Both positions had the husband in the official position but the wife was also very active in a way which was not clearly defined. There was also a youth minister. Seemed like a nice guy, but since I don't have kids I had next to no interaction with him.
The associate minister and his wife, a very balanced and grounded couple I liked a lot, moved out of town to respond to a family crisis. With them gone, the senior minister couple, the wife in particular, did some things I believe were very inappropriate and clearly contrary to any reasonable measure of Christian love or earthly good sense.
I was very deeply dismayed by her having us come into a side room for a ten minute haranguing tirade from her just before the service. Then, my partner in tears, Mrs. Pastor circulated with beaming smiles to happily start a service about how Christians communicate lovingly. Since then I've done more studies about cults and I think the senior minister couple were sliding downhill with some dangerous tendencies.
I was active in helping with one aspect of the ministry that used many volunteers. Although this is generally a strong area within the denomination, at the church with Alpha this area was led by someone without appropriate leadership ability or technical skills. That ministry area also went downhill.
All of this was very disconcerting to me.
At the church that presented Alpha there was no board, no elders, no clear path of oversight in the denomination. With no clear way to report a concern, we left that church. After a while we got a referral to a different religious group where we felt more welcomed.
Only one person tried to keep in touch, rather dismayed and baffled to hear about our bad experiences. There was no tell-off from anyone else, we simply stopped communicating on both sides.
This was at a time when my life really fell apart in several ways, including my health and my partner's health, and communication with almost everybody broke down. I miss some of the nice people there and have no way to contact them now. If I had their phone numbers or email addresses, the information was probably lost in a move across town since then.
Shortly after we left, the church gave up their plan to buy land and build a new larger building. They gave up their rented building and program space. They put heavy emphasis on the weekly home meetings, with monthly picnic in the park type of big meetings. From the description they somewhat like old-fashioned tent revivals.
From the updates described on their web site, apparently a super-enthusiastic core group loved these changes and felt they were recreating first-century Christianity. I got the impression they had even looser ties, or cut ties entirely I'm not sure which, with the non-denominational denomination such as it was.
This was at a time when the local economy took a nosedive. I don't know to this day if this non-church church idea was all really planned, or a scramble to salvage something after giving went way down.
Just now I took a look at the denomination's website. They have no listings in my metro area. They also now have a pretty clear path of regional overseers. Their Wikipedia entry mentions that in recent years they've added quite a bit of structure to try to keep up with their growth in new congregations.
The strange local non-church church's website is still up. It has no mention of anything about the denomination or the history of the church. It seems to have had no updates in a year and a half. Their actively happy discussion forum is long gone and there's no mention of the weekly home groups. But there are ways to donate money online!
A separate discussion forum about churches in general mentions some people from there who found a new church home in this town.
I also see comments from several people who point out that it's hard to generalize about the denomination, since each local senior pastor can pretty much do whatever they want. Apparently ordination as a senior pastor doesn't require seminary or any particular training, only experience as an associate pastor. It seems the reconnection with the divine that inspired the first church of this movement hasn't been lost, but attempts to duplicate that elsewhere sometimes work out and sometimes don't.
Well that's what I wanted to talk about. The experiences with the subsequent church are another story, probably for another time.